Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:g ABODES - NASA's Phoenix lander revealed water ice mere inches beneath the Martian surface, and chemical evidence from the landing site strongly hints that the region is habitable. But learning whether there is life in Martian ice will require drilling - and drilling on Mars will be anything but easy. See article.g INTELLIGENCE - Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that single brain cells, if confronted with a difficult task, can identify objects as dissimilar as sports cars and dogs. See article.g MESSAGE - Most SETI programs scan the sky looking for strong radio signals. Any signals that are deemed interesting are put on a list for follow-up observations weeks, months - even years later. Long delays in verification of potential ET signals sometimes generate tantalizing, but ultimately frustrating, stories. See article. Note: This article is from 2003.g COSMICUS - Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author of the "Physics of Star Trek," and Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, Calif., were in New York last week to probe the science of "Star Trek" at the World Science Festival. They also answered a few questions on the topic for ABCNews.com. See article.g LEARNING - When you think about it, science teachers probably spend too much time filling children's heads with science facts. Our textbooks are overstuffed, our assessment systems emphasize memorization over critical thinking, and we struggle to find time for inquiry. For decades, we've been telling our students "there are nine planets in our solar system" rather than "nine objects in our solar system meet our current definition of a planet." We shouldn't be surprised that students struggle to understand scientific knowledge as a social, human construct. See article.Get your SF book manuscript edited
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